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I recommended the Gospel of Mark to an unbeliever. He read it and found it “creepy.” That’s exactly the response I wanted.
This young man is probably an atheist or an agnostic but has lived in such a secular environment that he doesn’t seem to think of himself in such terms, any more than you would introduce yourself as “non-cannibalistic” or “anti-horse-theft.” He wanted, though, to try to understand—just as an intellectual exercise—why someone would hold to religious views or practices he finds alien.
He asked what he should read in order to do that. There are, of course, many places I would send such a person, but to him I said, “Why don’t you read the Gospel of Mark? Don’t worry about whether you understand it all; just read through it.”
I later ran into the secularist again, and he reported that he had taken my advice. “So, what did you think?” I asked.
He said he was conflicted. Reading the Gospel was, on the one hand, narratively gripping in a way that he hadn’t expected, supposing an ancient religious text would be preachy and propagandistic. On the other hand, he said, “It was kind of creepy.” And that’s when he brought up Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem.
This man knew that I had read the science fiction novel last year—and that I had done so reluctantly. A trusted friend had recommended the book to me with a warning: “Don’t give up. You will feel like you don’t know what’s going on and you’ll want to put it down. Keep reading and, you’ll see, it will all pay off in the end.” My unbelieving conversation partner had not read the book but he had watched some of the Netflix adaptation of it, 3 Body Problem.
Mild spoilers here: in both the book and the series, an alien civilization communicates with human scientists through a virtual reality gaming headset. The scientists are put in scenarios where they must solve the gravity fluctuations that are plunging the distant world into unpredictable periods of chaos and calm.
“At times, it was kind of like playing those games,” the young man said about reading Mark. “It was almost as though someone was on the other side, watching me.”
By that, he meant particularly that the “character” (his word) of Jesus in the text sometimes seemed to be written in a way that felt unexpectedly immediate. “Sometimes I had to remind myself that I wasn’t right there in the middle of everything. That kind of freaked me out a little bit.”
Although virtual reality aliens were not on my mind, this reaction was exactly what I had been hoping for when I’d recommended that he read Mark.
Usually if I’m helping someone “get” what Christianity is, I ask them to read the Gospel of John. With someone like this, though—who I don’t know if I’ll ever get to follow up with—I’ll suggest Mark, partly because it’s concise and relatively easy to read.
I also do this because of a story I heard years ago. If I remember right, a man who had been some sort of New Age Eastern religionist, the kind found often in the hippie countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, became a Christian because a professor in his comparative religion class assigned the Gospel of Mark. Like the young man, he was drawn to the figure of Jesus and started to feel as though he was not only reading the text but that he was being beckoned from the other side of it.
Leon Wieseltier argues that we have too much emphasis on “storytelling” right now—that this leads to a loss of arguments, of persuasion. “Storytelling is designed to inculcate certain responses, certain mental stances, in the listener. They are passivity, credulity, wonder,” Wieseltier writes. “All of them are stances of surrender.”
This, of course, denies that there are important truths one can only see from stances of passivity, credulity, wonder, and even surrender.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han agrees that we should be worried about how much we hear about storytelling, but that’s because—however much we talk about it—we’ve lost the ability to tell and to hear an actual story.
“We tell fewer and fewer stories in our everyday lives,” Han argues in his new book The Crisis of Narration, because “communication takes the form of the exchange of information.” In an information age, Han writes, an actual story is a disruption. Information, after all, is direct, controllable, and consumable. A story works a different way. A story requires that, in order to be experienced, some information must be withheld as well as revealed.
“Withheld information—that is, a lack of explanation—heightens narrative tension,” Han writes. “Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot be explained but only narrated. A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges.” That kind of mystery is startlingly rare in an era of algorithms.
Part of our problem is that we find a plot unsettling in an information age, especially if we start to see our lives as part of that plot. That’s what Han finds diminishing about algorithms. We consume bits of disconnected data—curated by our curiosities and our appetites—to the point that we no longer feel surprise. Reality itself starts to feel dead, like so much abstract data. The deadness brings forth more deadness.
“Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain,” he writes. “They lack germinal force. Once they are registered, they immediately sink into oblivion.” The metaphor immediately brought to mind Jesus’ own words: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24, ESV throughout).
Journalist David Samuels laments that we now live in the flatness of a time when story and song are hollowed out by Big Data, replaced by “consuming pornography and propaganda.”
“The goal of their governing algorithms isn’t to create beauty, or anything human; it’s to suck out your brains and then to slice and dice them into bits that can be analyzed and sold off to corporations and governments, which are fast becoming the same thing; it’s a mass mutilation of the human,” Samuels writes. “What that sounds like in practice is like a car alarm that keeps going off, at a higher and higher pitch—a sound that has no meaning in itself, except as a warning that something has been shattered.”
Maybe the three-body problemof it all is not the Bible but the rest of life. On the other side of our digital lives are intelligences seeking to question us—nameless, faceless algorithms designed to test us with just one question, “What do you want?” What if, though, our boredom and malaise are themselves signs that we weren’t meant to live like this?
Jesus said that this is a key reason he taught in parables, “because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matt. 13:13). A story requires a certain kind of participation, a certain lack of control. One must be prepared for, and often through, the story to hear what it is saying. One must be baffled enough to suspend control, to feel the tension, in order to not just share information but to experience something true. Without that sense of bafflement and mystery, a story lacks the ability to astonish and to linger.
Think, for instance, of the Gospel of John’s very familiar account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes—a miraculous sign so important that all the Gospels reference it. We tend to remember that there was a crowd of thousands, that there was not enough to eat, and that Jesus provided a feast from almost nothing. What most people don’t think about when recalling that story, however, is just how Jesus sets up the occurrence.
“Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?’” John records. “He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do” (6:5–6).
He himself knew what he would do. The question itself—the kind of momentary perplexity it would create in Philip—was Jesus’ intention. It’s the same pattern God followed with the tribes of Israel in the wilderness after the Exodus. Moses said to them: “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3).
Jesus does not just intend to feed; he intends that we would first “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt. 5:6). He did not simply intend to rescue Peter from drowning, but also that Peter would experience what it was like to go under water, to cry out and to feel a hand pulling him up (Matt. 14:30–31).
Jesus’ encounter with us in Scripture is meant to work the same way. We too are meant to find ourselves exclaiming with the Capernaum synagogue, “What is this? A new teaching with authority!” (Mark 1:27). We are meant to start asking the question, “Why does this man speak like that?” (Mark 2:7). We are meant to hear, as though addressed directly to us, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:29).
When one finds authority amid the algorithms, revelation among the consumption, that can feel creepy—just as after a time of starvation, the smell of baking bread can seem nauseating. It’s not those who find all this strange who are not “getting it” but rather those who find it all familiar and boring. That’s what a plot does, but it’s especially what a plot breathed out by the Spirit of Christ does, a plot in which we are meant to hear the voice of a Shepherd (John 10:4).
What if someone on the other side of those ancient words knows that you’re there? What if, in those words, you can almost hear the Galilean-accented voice that once disrupted the plotlines of some fishermen by saying, “Follow me”? What if it’s speaking to you? If so, finding that disturbingly strange isn’t the end of the story, but it’s a good place to start.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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